Imagination and Joy

You know that old homily that everyone is on a bell curve — we’re mostly clustered in the middle, those skewing left and are considered crazy while those few populating the far right edge are geniuses. I use that with my girls a lot, especially when they’re rolling their eyes at “weird mom.”

Imagination lifts us beyond mediocrity — think of those amazing individuals who began the “honor flights” for veterans of WWII. Think, you’re sitting around having a few beers and you start talking about a trip to DC, and the new WWII memorial there. Your buddy says that it’s a real shame that a lot of those guys will never see it — they’re fading away pretty quickly. Do you agree and go back to nursing your beer — NO! Blue-skying becomes planning and suddenly it’s possible for every living veteran of to go to DC for the day — it’s happening all over the country now because someone had the sheer imagination to say, “why can’t we do this!” For more information, check out http://www.honorflight.org.

BTW, I have no idea if they began their brainstorming over beers, but I know I’ve had some of my best ideas in that kind of free-flowing forum!

When your imagination flies and you let yourself go along for the ride — that’s where the joy comes. For me, it’s constructing that perfect sentence, or the other day when I nailed the cover for the book I’m working on — it was just right. Chris calls those my “hey nonny nonny moments.” OK, it’s a long story involving Kenneth Branagh’s “Much Ado about Nothing” and dancing in a grocery store, but I digress.

Sometimes, joy catches you off guard — case in point, we haven’t had a good rain in weeks. The other night it stormed for maybe 30 minutes, so the girls and I cranked up the ipod and danced on the deck in the rain! Now in my little joy touchstones, I’ll hear Kelly Rowland singing, “I’m Beginning to see the Light,” or the Jonas Brothers, “SOS” and I’ll be whirling in the rainy moonlight laughing.

Joyous music would be: Irene Cara singing “Fame,” or India.Arie’s “Video,” or maybe Jackson Browne’s “Somebody’s Baby” which reminds me of hiking along the Eno River in NC and clambering over the rocks to the middle and feeling like the “Queen of the World” (my apologies Leonardo!)

Curiousity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind –> Samuel Johnson